Overwatch 2 dev confirms Mercy players were “boosted” in OW1 ranked

An Overwatch 2 developer has revealed that Mercy players had their ranks “boosted” in OW1 because of a flaw with the system.

Overwatch’s competitive mode has been under a lot of scrutiny over the years, with the sequel only just getting a major revamp in Season 9 – but it seems like the original game had even more significant issues.

Currently, the game rewards players with a boost in SR depending on the result of a match, with wins resulting in players gaining rank, while losses will do the opposite. Pretty simple, right?

Well, in the original game, the mode also factored in a player’s performance – and according to Systems Designer Gavin Winter, this ended up artificially boosting the rank for some players, specifically Mercy mains.

Blizzard Entertainment

Mercy players may not have all deserved their rank in OW1.

Mercy mains were “boosted” in Overwatch

Speaking with ML7 during a Twitch stream, Winter reiterated that how players do in a match doesn’t matter below Diamond, noting how Overwatch 1 had a system that factored in one’s overall numbers.

“It was just putting out garbage data a lot of the time, like unreliable data,” the dev said. “Basically, we had this weird scenario where some Mercy players got really boosted because the system thought their performance was really good.”

Winter explained that the system would look at a Mercy player’s healing numbers and thought that, because in higher ranks Mercys heal less and do more damage boosting, it began to associate not healing with success.

“That wasn’t always good that they were healing less. Sometimes, it just means they’re not healing or doing anything,” he added. “It’s really hard for a machine learning algorithm to make correct predictions about somebody’s rank, because there’s a lot of context in the game that matters.”

He went on to use deaths as an example, stating that while having low deaths is a good thing, it’s not that great when someone is just sitting in a corner and hiding.

Luckily, this issue isn’t impacting games any longer, but if you were playing back in Overwatch 1, you may finally have an answer as to why Mercy players in your games may not have been exactly the best teammates – especially if you were high-ranked yourself.